


is it my fault? (we've been missing each other)

by quidhitch



Category: Batman (Comics), DCU
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Jason Todd is Robin, Jason is Ethnic lol, Latino Jason Todd, also this jumps around in time and perspective a lot and is generally very messy sorry lol, but also red hood Jason later, i specifically picture him as afrolatinx but whatever floats ur boat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-10
Updated: 2019-04-10
Packaged: 2020-01-07 15:32:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18413525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quidhitch/pseuds/quidhitch
Summary: He and Bruce are always doing Weird Old People Stuff together. Jason suspects that this is largely due to the fact that Bruce is, in fact, A Weird Old Person, but it’s maybe also because Bruce thinks Jason needs the quiet, reflective nature of those kinds of spaces. He’s spent so much of the past thirteen years parkour-style jumping from one crisis to the next, and he gets the sense that all this fabricated leisure time is Bruce trying to show him there’s another way to live....If he wants it, that is. Jason remains undecided on that front.





	is it my fault? (we've been missing each other)

**Author's Note:**

> i have a lot of feelings ab this dynamic and im sad

He and Bruce are always doing Weird Old People Stuff together. Jason suspects that this is largely due to the fact that Bruce is, in fact, A Weird Old Person, but it’s maybe also because Bruce thinks Jason needs the quiet, reflective nature of those kinds of spaces. He’s spent so much of the past thirteen years parkour-style jumping from one crisis to the next, and he gets the sense that all this fabricated leisure time is Bruce trying to show him there’s another way to live.

If he decides he wants it.

Which he’s not sure he does, because the Gotham Art Museum is boring as shit. He spends most of the time getting glared by what he assumes are the Security Officers, either for getting too close to the painting or for being the type of person they wouldn’t expect to see in a museum in the first place.

“What?” Jason asks one of them, exasperated. He’s standing in front of a Magritte that’s at least six feet tall. “Do you think I’m gonna try and shove it in my pocket?”

The officer looks disgruntled and quickly breaks eye contact, mumbling an incomprehensible apology to “Mr. Wayne”. Bruce is smiling next to him, a hand on his shoulder in a way that’s distinctly paternalistic. It’s… strange. Like Bruce is saying ‘this is my son, and if you take on him you take on me’, except Jason's sure that can't be the right read of the situation, because he doesn’t think he’s really done anything to deserve that kind of loyalty.

In any case, Bruce doesn’t admonish Jason for bad manners or try to steer him away, just lets the confrontation run its course with quiet amusement. Bruce may be weird and old, but he’s still pretty cool, all things said.

“You’re not having fun,” he says, matter-of-fact.

“Nope,” Jason says, popping the ‘p’. “Half these paintings look the same and I feel like people spend waaaaay to much time looking at them. Really, Tabitha, have you really been critically analyzing that 2-foot Portrait of A European Rando for a whole ass ten minutes? Or did you actually spend half that time thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner?”

“You sure you’re not just projecting?”

“I’m sure.”

“Fair enough.”

They walk through the gallery in relative silence. It’s completely empty, and Jason doesn’t know if that’s because Bruce rented the place out or if it’s because there’s not actually enough people in Gotham who have the time or the money to look at art in the middle of the day. Both explanations are kinda annoying in their own ways.

“There was one painting I liked, though,” Jason says, glancing briefly Bruce.

“Yeah?” Bruce raises an eyebrow. “Show me.”

So Jason takes him to the space allocated for rotating exhibits — things that are too famous to stay in Gotham very long. He leads Bruce to a piece titled ‘The Gulf Stream’ by Winslow Homer. It’s huge and blue and the only thing that Jason spent more than thirty seconds looking at in the whole place.

In the foreground of the painting, there’s a black man on a dilapidated boat, laying casually on his back and propped up by his elbows. One hand rests flat on the deck, the other loosely holds a piece of rope. The sea around him is rough, and the splintered mast makes it apparent that the vessel is in imminent danger of capsizing into the surrounding shark-infested waters.

In the background, there are puffy white clouds sitting on the horizon, and the specter of a much bigger and safer ship headed in the opposite direction. It’s the kind of detail Jason would’ve missed if he hadn’t stared at it so long, captivated by the man’s nonchalance.

Bruce stares at it for a long time.

“Why this one?”

Jason gives him a deadpan look that he hopes effectively communicates ‘I Don’t Know, Why Do You Run Around Gotham Dressed Like A Giant Bat?’.

“Okay,” Bruce concedes, the corner of his mouth twitching in a smile, “what do you like about it?”

Jason heaves a sigh and thinks about that for a second, turning his eyes back to the work at hand. There's something about the man's face that's striking, like he's done this before— like he's been there forever, maybe, and the fact that the catastrophe of the moment is displayed in an art gallery doesn't make it any less regular, in the grand scheme of things.

“I don’t know," Jason shrugs. “I like that he’s just chillin’.”

“Yeah,” Bruce says thoughtfully. “Me too.”

 

* * *

  

The cave is silent except for the sound of dripping water. Jason sits on a hospital-style bed, legs not yet long enough to touch the floor. Bruce is knelt in front of him and picking gravel out of the scrapes on his knees, face completely closed off even as Jason can feel the anger radiating off him in waves.

Every twitch of the tweezers against his shredded skin hurts so fucking much, and Jason’s teeth ache from how tight his jaw is clenched shut. His eyes are welling with tears and he knows that he’s about half a second away from letting them spill over. He hates crying in front of Bruce. He hates crying in front of anyone, really, except maybe Alfred.

“Why aren’t you lecturing me?” he asks, fingers curling in the thin sheet of paper that keeps his blood from getting everywhere.

Bruce shakes his head once, tight and controlled like he does everything. “Frankly, Jason, I don’t know what good it would do.”

Jason feels so small, feels like fucking crap. He wants to get back out there and punch fifteen more people until he’s too tired to feel this mortifying churning in his stomach.

“Fuck you,” Jason bites out, “Nobody died. We caught the bad guy.“

“You could have died. That’s different.”

“Isn’t that the point? We could die every night! But we still do it, because it’s— ”

“No,” Bruce cuts in, voice dangerously soft. “No, that is absolutely not the point. And if you really think that, you’re not ready for this job and the responsibility it entails.”

Jason actually cries then, silent and still like he taught himself to do when he was seven years old and he didn’t want his mom to know she was scaring him. His expression crumples in pain as Bruce extracts a particularly large pebble. Blood runs down his calf, and Bruce takes a towel and catches it before it hits the floor, pressing the cool cloth to the ruddy skin of Jason’s knee.

“Hold it there,” Bruce says gruffly.

Jason does as he’s told.

Bruce stares at him for a couple more seconds, some emotion Jason can’t read constrained on his face. He exhales a small sigh that looses exactly none of the tension trapped in his shoulders, but when he reaches over to rumple Jason’s hair, his touch is soft.

“Alfred can take care of you. We’ll talk more in the morning.”

Bruce rises to his feet and straightens his back, big and tall and important in a way Jason never thinks someone like him could be. He walks stiffly towards the exit of the cave, dismissively waving off Alfred’s attempts to pass him a First Aid kit.

When he’s gone, Jason tucks his legs up against his chest. Alfred comes to sit next to him on the bed and puts a hand on his back, rubbing soothing circles between his shoulders.

“He’s gonna make me leave,” Jason sniffs, rubbing furiously at his eyes, as if that would stop the flow of tears.

“Master Jason,” Alfred shakes his head, voice soft with reprimand. He exhales a sigh and gathers Jason a little closer, letting Jason tip his head onto Alfred’s shoulder. “He would never. He acts this way because he loves you very much, and the idea of something happening to you terrifies him.”

Jason sniffles again and Alfred hands him a handkerchief. “I don’t know how to be what… whatever the fuck he wants me to be,” Jason blows his nose, feeling stupid and pathetic. “Dick, maybe. I’m never gonna be fucking Dick.”

“He misses Master Richard, yes,” Alfred says consolingly. He ducks down to meet Jason’s eyes, wide and gray and wise. “But that doesn’t mean he loves you or trusts you any less.”

Jason doesn’t believe him. Alfred probably isn’t intentionally lying, but he also feels like maybe he’s got the both of them fooled somehow. Like one of these days, they’re going to wake up and realize that he doesn’t deserve this — anything they’ve given him — and they’re going to dump him back in Crime Alley where he belongs. It’s only a matter of time. He never should’ve gotten used to it, is the problem.

“Come, Master Jason. We’ll put a bit of antiseptic in these cuts and get you to bed.”

Jason drags the handkerchief over his face, wishing he could scrub away the feeling of having just cried. He sucks all his snot back in with a sound that is satisfyingly disgusting, even against the hollow feeling in his chest.

“Fine,” he says. _Only a matter of time._ “Thanks, Alfred.”

 

* * *

 

It used to fuck Jason up that whenever Bruce would hug him as a kid, he’d put his palm on the back of Jason’s head like he was cradling him. It was easy to forget that Bruce knew how to emote and express affection in normal human ways, but when he did manage to scrounge up the emotional breadth, that only made the gesture more unexpectedly and shockingly tender. And it wasn’t even that they hugged a lot, it was more that Jason had forgotten, after spending so long with his shell of a mother, what actual warmth felt like.

  
Pretty pathetic, really.

 

* * *

 

 

In the sixth grade, Jason's teacher makes him submit his creative writing assignment to a poetry contest.

He wins first prize. He doesn’t tell Bruce when he makes it past the class competition, or the school one, or the regional one. Bruce only finds out he placed nationwide after receiving the certificate of award in the mail.

(Jason still remembers the way the paper felt between his fingers, thick, expensive card stock with a gold foil seal. And his name, Jason Peter Todd, in perfect curling script. He never thought his name could look like that. So… grand. _Official._ Like it really meant something.)

Bruce holds it like it’s something precious. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, expression firm and concerned.

Jason doesn’t say anything for a minute, just stabs at his ketchup-covered eggs and tries to think of something less embarrassing than ‘I didn’t want you to know if I’d lost’. He wasn’t quite used to that growing feeling at the center of his chest, the way he wanted Bruce’s approval more than he wanted to breathe, sometimes.

“Can I read the poem?” Bruce asks, voice carefully void of expectation.

“It’s not even that good,” Jason shrugs, setting down his fork. He tucks one of his legs up against his chest, scratches at the healing scabs on his knees.“I think I just got it ‘cause they felt bad for me.”

“Well, what did you write about?”

“My mom.”

Bruce hums in understanding, and, for a moment, doesn’t press further. The silence is comfortable. Solidarity between orphans: it was a lifetime guarantee.

“I’d like to read it anyways.”

Jason shrugs again, like it isn’t a big deal. Like he hasn’t ached to show it to Bruce since the second he’d put it down on paper. Like he hasn’t sat at the breakfast table ten mornings before this one with the words of the poem sitting on the tip of his tongue, trapped behind the cage of his teeth.

He reaches for his backpack underneath the table and drags it into his lap. It’s heavy with the books assigned for class and the books that were much more interesting than the ones assigned for class. He shoves his hand into the bottom of it, dragging out a crumpled copy of the item in question and placing it on the table next to Bruce’s coffee.

Bruce, unperturbed, straightens it along the edge of the table, adjusts the slant of his reading glasses on his nose, and quietly peruses the words.

“They’re making me read it during assembly on Friday,” Jason interjects, nervous. Bruce only glances up briefly before looking back at the page, making a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat. “I don’t wanna. It’s lame as shit.”

More silence. Jason thinks he might vibrate out of his skin, caught between the urge to stare blankly at his breakfast and the urge to try and read something into Bruce’s ever-impervious expression. It’s a short poem. Bruce has to have read it more than once, by now. Jason twists his hands.

“It’s not—“ he starts, cheeks suddenly hot with embarrassment, “I mean, I didn’t even—“

“Jason,” Bruce interrupts, shaking his head. He lowers the page, and a small, sad kind of smile shapes his mouth. Hope rears its head in Jason’s chest. “This is very good. I wish you had let me read it earlier.”

“Oh.”

“We should print it up on nicer paper,” Bruce nods, business-like, still smoothing out some of the wrinkles with his big hands. “Get it framed for the study. I’ll talk to Alfred.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Jason protests weakly. He fights off his smile with sudden urgency, terrified of the expanding joy at the pit of his stomach.

“Why wouldn't I?” Bruce asks. He sets the page down and his smile grows a fraction of an inch. “I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks.”

He almost says it, then. _Dad_. He doesn’t actually, but it’s a very near thing. He’s suddenly nervous that Bruce knows anyways, but if he does, it doesn’t seem to bother him. He goes back to looking at the poem with that mysteriously nostalgic smile.

They eat the rest of their breakfasts in comfortable silence. Jason is happy the whole week and reads the poem at the Friday assembly with minimal complaining. Alfred starches his collar. Bruce takes time off work to come see him. They go out for pancakes afterward.

On the way back to the Manor, Jason rides in the front seat of the Porsche with the windows down and the sun streaming through the trees. For the first time in his life, he understands what poets mean when they say the world looks rosy.

 

* * *

 

“Todd?”

Jason glances up, realizes how close he’d been to sleep, and rubs at a healing bruise under his eye. “Demon spawn,” he greets, bracing his arm on the window sill and flicking ash off the butt of his cigarette.

Damian’s not afraid of him. Even Dick is, sometimes, but not Damian. Like attracts like, he supposes.

“Is this—“ Damian cuts himself off, supplies a heavy black frame from behind his back. “JPT. That is you, correct?”

Jason squints at the thing and feels the most bizarre urge to laugh. He takes another pull of his cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs and staring absently out the window. Of all the ghosts to haunt him tonight, it had to be some shitty fucking middle school poetry about mangoes and his distant mother.

“Yeah,” Jason says, because it’s no use lying to Damian. “It’s me.”

Damian blinks a couple times then nods once. He looks so much like Bruce, for a second, that something in Jason internally recoils.

“I liked it,” Damian says.

Jason quirks an eyebrow. “You like poetry?”

“Not all of it,” Damian turns his nose up a little. Jason had never met a person who actually did that, before him. It just seemed like the kind of thing Dickens made up so everyone would hate Estella Havisham. “I like Rumi.”

Jason hums, looks out the window. “Me too.”

“We’re reading Robert Frost in school.”

“Robert Frost fucking sucks.”

“For once, your vulgarities are on the nose.”

They sit in silence for a minute. Jason takes another puff from his cigarette before putting it out on his armor and tossing the butt out the window. He’s sure Damian will be watching the proceedings with the utmost distaste, but when he turns to look, there’s a far more complicated edge to his expression.

Jason raises his eyebrows, a nonverbal _what?_

Damian shakes his head again, the perfect opposite to his perfunctory nod. This gesture is meant to expel, but no less Bruce-ian than the last.

“He’s kept it on the wall all this time.”

“Has he?” Jason remarks, surlier than he means it to be.

“Yes,“ Damian narrows his eyes and stares at his boots, caught in contemplation. “It is clearly... important to him. In some capacity.”

“I thought you were against the rest of us getting cozy with Bruce. Less for you, or whatever dumbass logic.”

Damian scowls, but, irritatingly enough, still finds the patience to continue, “I can't possibly imagine why, Todd, but it’s quite obvious that he misses you.”

“He doesn’t,” Jason says, and genuinely wishes he had the energy or capacity to sound an iota more reassuring. “Trust me.”

His bones creak and groan when he gets up off the chair, a pleasant ache spreading across his lower back. Fuck. He’s really not gonna be able to move tomorrow. He digs his phone out the pocket of his motorcycle jacket, thinking that he needs a fucking joint. And Roy, maybe. Both suddenly sound immediately and urgently necessary.

“You can throw that away,” he nods at the frame in Damian’s hand.

“I’m not going to. It’s his.”

“Alright,” Jason says, and tries very hard not to feel a single thing about that. “Whatever.”

 

* * *

 

He remembers giving Bruce and Alfred lists every so often. The Wayne poetry collection was a little stuffy, old-fashioned, and although he liked Keats just fine, he knew there was more to the world than love-induced fevers. Derek Walcott, Margaret Atwood, Aimé Césaire, Maya Angelou. Bruce ordered a bookcase for his room, made of dark cherry wood and easily the nicest thing he’d ever owned.

He texts Bruce later that day, Roy’s legs tossed over his, fingers greasy with French fry seasoning.

_The kid likes Rumi. Better taste than you._

He's startled at how quickly he gets a response, phone buzzing to life in his pocket just seconds after Jason tucks it away.

**Not just Rumi. He reads Omeros at breakfast.**

He stares at the text for a couple seconds before barking out a laugh, despite himself. It must be Jason's old copy of _Omeros_ that he's reading. Jason's surprised to find he doesn't hate the thought. Roy fixes him with a funny look, clumsily attempting to maneuver his way across Jason's lap, gaming for a peek at his phone screen.

 _He’s t_ e n

**You were twelve.**

That, for whatever reason, makes Jason smile.

  

* * *

 

Bruce spends the weeks after Jason dies in his study, staring out the window and making mental lists of all the things they never got to do together. He can sit for hours, barely moving for an entire afternoon and the subsequent evening, except to take sips of Scotch and push away Alfred's proffered trays of food. That kind of stillness had brought him peace in the past, but now it's nothing short of torture, and the worst kind of torture, too, the kind he knows he deserves.

It isn't just things he'd already made plans to do. He thinks up new things, too, places and people and stuff Jason would've loved, or absolutely hated and then enjoyed complaining about or holding over Bruce's head. That was the strange thing about Jason, Bruce often got the sense that it didn't so much matter where they went or what they did, as long as they came up with it together. It was the kind of self-awareness and heightened appreciation for life that a child shouldn't have, but then again, Bruce supposes Jason never got the chance to be a child in the same way other people did.

"We should've gone up to the coast," he mumbles. Jason would've written poetry about the crashing waves. It would have reminded him of 'The Gulf Stream'. "Why didn't we do that?"

Alfred places a hand on his shoulder and squeezes, at a loss for words. The study is unerringly silent. 

  

* * *

 

Bruce has spent the past fourteen hours in back-to-back meetings with investors, and the only thing he can think is how badly he wishes he could talk to Dick.

Not the sullen, standoffish Dick of recent days, who often looks like he’d rather be pulling off his own fingernails than spending time with Bruce. No, Bruce wishes for the bright-eyed eight-year-old who’d drop onto Bruce’s shoulders the second he walked into the living room, clap his hands over Bruce’s eyes, and say ‘ha. Got you!’ with a kind of smugness that couldn’t be taught. He feels shockingly old, for a moment, and when he passes the mirror in the front hall, he can’t help but wonder if there’s a bit more gray around his temples than usual.

It’s a school night, so he presumes Jason is asleep. He needs a drink — something to settle the nerves buzzing under his skin. He’s too tired to go out on patrol and too restless to go to sleep. The combination grates his nerves like nothing else. As he makes his way through the silent house with stiff strides, he’s surprised to find the lights in the sitting room still on. Alfred is typically so meticulous about that sort of thing.

The mystery is quickly resolved when he realizes that Jason is curled up on the couch, drooling onto the hand-embroidered pillows, papers strewn across the coffee table in front of him. The architecture of the manor means the circulation is relatively poor, so it’s a somewhat stuffy on nights when Alfred’s turned the heat up in anticipation of the cold. Jason insists on using one of the tablecloths for a blanket, claiming it’s the only thing with the right thickness.

Bruce pauses in the entryway, rapping his knuckles twice on the wall. Jason’s a light enough sleeper that it makes him start, has him sitting up and blinking rapidly in seconds.

“Did you wait up for me?” Bruce asks, critically inspecting the face of his watch.

“No,” Jason says, rubbing furiously at his eyes. He flushes a little too, eyes darting away from Bruce’s in a way that’s so earnestly transparent that something in Bruce’s chest loosens at the sight. “I had homework.”

“Alfred let you stay up this late?”

“Alfred’s not the boss of me. He’s only the boss of you.”

Bruce smiles. Jason’s whip-smart — has an answer for anything before the other party can even finish their sentence. Different from Dick, in that way.

“Did you finish your homework?”

“No. Algebra was invented by the government to oppress me.”

“You, specifically?”

“Yeah,” Jason yawns, settling against the back of the couch and sighing. “They knew I’d be too powerful otherwise.”

“I see. Well, in any case, it’s time for bed now. You can finish algebra in the morning.”

“Or never.”

Bruce fixes him with a highly skeptical glance. Jason loves school, and, even in the subjects he doesn't harbor natural talent in, he's loathe to disappoint his teachers. Bruce has definitive evidence — he stayed up until five in the morning making a paper mache volcano just three weeks ago for this precise reason.

As Bruce hustles Jason off the couch and upstairs, ignoring the absolutely appalling slew of curses he’s issued in response, he realizes that his own irritation with the evening has melted away completely, leaving an exhaustion more suited to relatively fitful sleep in its wake.

“Why are you staring at me like that, weirdo?” Jason asks him, squinting at Bruce with tired eyes. “What’s wrong with your face?”

“Nothing,” Bruce shakes his head, squeezing Jason’s shoulder. “Brush your teeth before you go to bed.”

 

* * *

  

The sight of Duke sitting at the kitchen counter and laughing at something on his phone isn’t exactly an irregular one, for a Tuesday afternoon, but the way he catches sight of Bruce and immediately shoves the device between the couch cushions is slightly more interesting.

Bruce takes a sip of his coffee. “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” Duke says, far too quickly. None of them are particularly talented at lying to him, but Duke, with his widening eyes and instantly clammy palms, has to be the worst at it. It’s more endearing than it should be.

“Really?”

“Really. Anyways, when are we gonna kick trees? I was promised hours of tree kicking.”

“Let me finish my breakfast,” Bruce admonishes, feeling a prickle of mildly sadistic satisfaction at the way Duke squirms a little. He allows for a couple seconds of silence and takes a thoughtful bite of cut-up cantaloupe.

“It can’t be a me me,” he says, pronouncing it wrong just to make Duke’s eye twitch. “If it was one of those, you would’ve just showed me.”

“Why are you doing this? I don’t think you want to know!”

Bruce doesn’t say anything, just takes another sip of his coffee and keeps his eyes on Duke. The less he says, the more they assume, and the more they assume, the more outlandish their notions of him get. It was a trick which no longer worked on Dick, Jason, and Tim, but Duke was new, and sweeter than any of them had been. Bruce can see the exact moment he caves.

“Oh my god,” he groans, shoving his hand between couch cushions and supplying his phone, “they’re literally gonna kill me.”

“Who?”

“Dick and Jason.”

Bruce’s eyebrows creep higher towards his hairline. “How would they know it was you?”

“Because you raised, like, eight detectives, Bruce.” Despite his burgeoning anxiety, Duke still breaks out into a grin as he pulls up evidence of whatever Dick and Jason did that was so terribly funny. He hands the phone to Bruce and claps his hand over his eyes, like he can’t bear to watch him see it. Much as the thought feels out of place in Bruce’s shadowy pre-coffee brain, he really is the sweetest.

Bruce directs his attention to the screen, brow immediately furrowing in concern.

“They got suuuuper drunk last night,” Duke explains, peeking at Bruce in the space between his fingers. “Like.  _Super_  drunk. I think they had a bottle of absinthe or something, and Dick thought it was gin because he’s illiterate, and Jason thought it was funny so he didn’t say anything.”

It occurs to Bruce that he’s looking at footage of Jason’s apartment, which he has only ever seen from the doorway. It’s cleaner than Dick’s. And bigger, but Bruce supposes that’s to be expected as he’s paying his own rent.

Dick is slouched over on the sofa, cheeks red and hair sticking up all over the place. He’s saying something that’s barely comprehensible, and Jason must be recording, because the camera keeps shaking as if the person behind it is caught in a fit of laughter.

“Romeo and Juliet.... is about.... a mouse.... two mice, and they, like, find an orphan.”

“Dipshit,” Jason says, “you’re literally describing the plot of The Rescuers.”

“You love The Rescuers!”

“Yeah, but it’s a very different story from RJ.”

“You know what, Jay?” Dick asks, grinning, and then, with absolutely no wind-up, he launches himself at Jason and the phone goes clattering to the ground. The camera is tilted against the carpet but in the background, Bruce can hear Dick yelling, “you’re such a fucking nerd!” and Jason yelling back, “at least my name doesn’t mean penis!”

The clip comes to an end. Bruce looks up at Duke, one eyebrow raised.

“There’s at least ten more,” Duke tells him, shaking his head. “Jay sent them all to Babs last night. One of them is of Dick leaving her a very weepy, romantic voicemail.” Duke cringes a little, features creasing in sympathy. “I didn’t watch that. There has to be some solidarity.”

“Noble of you,” Bruce says wryly.

“You’re not… mad or anything, right?”

“I’m not mad.”

Bruce scrolls past a few more videos — one of Jason trying to do pull-ups with his towel bar and breaking the thing off the wall, another of Dick holding some random cat against his face, a particularly heinous one of Dick chugging milk straight out of the gallon and then snorting it out of his nose when Jason says something presumably very humorous.

“Did someone check on them this morning?” Bruce asks, glancing up at Duke.

“Yeah, Roy went over. He says Dick’s not even hungover.”

Bruce snorts. Jason must love that.

The final file isn’t a video, but a picture. A ’Selfie’, specifically, of Dick with his arm slung around Jason’s neck, reddened face suspended in laughter. Jason looks at him out of the corner of his eye, tolerant and amused. He’s also bleeding from his temple, but that seems a secondary detail to both of them.

They look happy. Bruce isn’t so deluded that he doesn’t know the majority of the feeling is due to the half-empty bottle of Absinthe Jason is holding, but it’s a nice picture anyway.

“This one,” Bruce says, holding the phone up to Duke. “Will you send it to me?”

Duke hesitates, then smiles and nods, taking the phone back from Bruce. He’s still smiling when he looks down at the screen, eyes gentle and fond.

“‘Course, Bruce.”

“Thank you.”

 

* * *

 

They plan a lunch. Jason’s very adamant that it’s a working lunch, and tells Bruce several times to remember to save the receipts so he can get a tax write-off.

Bruce tries to make reservations at a restaurant uptown, but Jason cancels at the last minute and says he wants to meet at the Gotham Mercado. When he gets there, Jason’s already in front of their old cart, under the cover of a truly massive Peruvian flag that’s trembling in the afternoon wind.

He looks less bulky than he did when he first returned to Gotham. Just as tall and still vaguely imposing, but less like he was working himself to the bone to make it happen. He’s even found civilian clothing with a little bit of personality rather than his typical black on black ensembles, sporting a white sweatshirt with one of Jenny Holzer’s truisms printed across the back in neat red font.

GOVERNMENT IS A BURDEN ON THE PEOPLE

Bruce wonders where he got it. He knows so little about Jason’s life. It’s not something he’s comfortable thinking about for too long.

Though he’s hanging back, Jason seems to sense his presence and straightens his posture minutely. He turns round to look at Bruce, eyes all steel and smoke.

“I’m ordering for both of us,” he yells, leaving no room for argument.

Bruce sighs. “Nothing with—“

“Nothing with too much cheese. I fucking know. Give me a second.”

Jason turns back around, expression smoothing into neutrality as he digs his wallet out of his back pocket and supplies a couple of bills. The lady behind the counter tentatively asks Jason how he is in Spanish, and his face just… opens up. He smiles, easy and fond in a way he never allows himself to be anymore, and Bruce watches in quiet fascination as he starts chatting about the food, the weather, how busy the stand is today, how great everything smells.Bruce knows Spanish, but listening feels intrusive in a uniquely terrible way.

Besides, if Jason looked back at him now, his jaw would most certainly tighten and his lip would curl in a sneer. Bruce doesn’t want that. He stays quiet, looks intently at the blank screen of his phone.

Eventually, the lady waves Jason away, telling him to stop distracting her. He laughs a little before spinning on his heel and locking eyes with Bruce, at which point he predictably resumes that typical condescending, stormy expression. There's a force kind of casualness in the way he's also idly spinning their table number in his hand.

“Don’t make a big thing out of this,” he says stiffly. “I wanted a fucking empanada. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Alright.”

“I’m just saying. Don’t think I’m gonna start, like, coming around the Manor for family dinner or anything. We are not family.”

“That sounds fine to me.”

A small silence.

“We should bring an empanada home for Alfred,” he grumbles. “With the powdered sugar. And maybe a mangonada. He still like those?”

Bruce doesn’t say that he has no idea because they stopped coming here after Jason died. He doesn’t say that this whole part of the city felt haunted to the both of them, that they also went out of their way to avoid the baseball stadium and Jason’s favorite secondhand bookstore. That even the thought of coming back had made something ugly and vicious curl at the pit of Bruce’s stomach, but he’d fought through it in the name of preserving this tenuous alliance they’ve crafted.

He doesn’t say any of that. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter now anyway.

“I think he still does.”

They sit down at the picnic tables next to the carts. Jason rips apart napkins, because he always needs something to do with his hands when he’s this alert, and talks about his most recent case. The lady brings their food and Jason smiles at her again. She pinches his cheek.

When she leaves, he fixes Bruce with a flat expression that is eerily reminiscent of Alfred’s.

“You eating a sandwich with a fork is fundamentally wrong.”

“I waste less this way.”

“Not everything is about efficiency, Bruce.” Except he says it in a heavily accented voice, and pronounces his name like ‘Broo-chay’. Jason's always done that, put on these little performances. Maybe the difference now is that he's no longer waiting for Bruce's applause. Bruce feels guilty for missing that, sometimes.

He shakes the thoughts away now, picks at a stray chunk of mango on the edge of his plate. When Jason bites into his empanada, it puffs out a cloud of powdered sugar. Some of it lands on the sleeve of Bruce’s suit jacket. Most of it sticks to Jason’s nose.

“Fuck,” he says with his mouth full, rubbing relentlessly at the wrong part of his face. “Did I get it?”

Bruce smiles and looks down at his food, carefully sectioning off a bite with his dingy plastic fork. “Yeah,” he says. “You got it.”

 

* * *

 

Some parents talk about their kids like they invented them. That's not true for Bruce. Every good thing about Jason was part of him long before Bruce took him in. 

There are still oceans between them and some of them are definitively uncrossable, but, for now, Bruce has a date in his calendar for another lunch. So maybe that's a start.

**Author's Note:**

> read more about me being sad on tumblr @ quidhitch


End file.
